Enter the textural universe
Imagine what it takes to become a player in one of the world’s professional orchestras. The world’s leading conservatoires are packed with enthusiastic, highly motivated performers who, in order to gain entry, have already surpassed the musical achievements of countless competitors. Having completed the performance grade exams to the highest standards, they’ll have pushed on through their teenage years, representing regional and national youth orchestras and then they’ll enter into three or four years of full-time study.
The competition gets fiercer, the physical and mental requirements are more demanding and, all the while, the hours spent practicing an ever-more-challenging collection of musical works grows and grows. In this regard, it always feels valuable to compare life as an orchestral musician with that of an elite athlete; the sacrifices made to achieve the standard required to compete are similarly stringent.
And just like for professional athletes, being a great musical player means being a master of all of the techniques your instrument allows for and being ready to draw on the right ones, as the music requires. If you’re a violinist, you don’t only know how to play loudly or softly, or how to play long or short notes. Instead, you know what to expect if you use fewer hairs of the bow, or what happens when you play nearer the end of the fingerboard or, conversely, nearer the bridge. You know what happens when you apply more of the weight of your bow arm and you know how to contour a note so that it starts aggressively, mellows in the middle and becomes no more than a breath right at the end.
In the early days of hard-diskbased sampling – when sample libraries finally threw off the shackles of limited memory and looped samples – numerous companies developed libraries which captured the ‘standard’ articulations of orchestral instruments/sections in hitherto-unseen clarity. Suddenly, here were rounded pizzicatos, biting staccatos which responded beautifully to velocity mapping and, best of all, legato and sustained sections which convincingly slid from one note to the next in a way which became, to some ears, indistinguishable from the real thing.
But composers working with orchestras are just like anyone else in the music-making world who’s looking to collate sounds; they’re constantly striving for new combinations of instruments and new playing techniques, which might offer a texture or tone to convey a musical emotion in a way never heard before. And now, using a combination of the players emerging from those conservatoires and the almost limitless available spare gigabytes on your hard drives, some sample library manufacturers are providing them with toolkits to satisfy their appetites for experimentalism.